Amazon has released a glimpse of what its much-anticipated drone deliveries could look like, although it warns the service is still very much in a testing phase.
A video released over the weekend shows a drone being loaded with a small package on a warehouse conveyor line. It then floats through a suburban neighborhood to a house, hovers over a yard, slowly lowers itself onto a small landing pad and deposits the package, all in about 30 minutes.
"It looks like science fiction, but it's real. One day, seeing Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road," the company says in a news release.
The drones will fly no higher than 400 feet from the ground -- low enough to avoid other aircraft but high enough to bypass traffic-clogged streets. They will be able to carry packages of no more than 5 pounds and travel distances of 10 miles or more, Amazon says.
You may recall that in 2013, Amazon released this video of what it envisioned the delivery drone might look like: